Breathe
by LadyMoriel
Summary: He's going to need magic to take his staff back from SHIELD, so Loki finally tries to sleep - and when he does, a memory is waiting for him, of pain and suffocation and wanting to die. Written entirely in the universe of LadyCharity's "Syrgja," without which this won't make a lot of sense.


This is the first creative thing I think I've properly finished in at least two years, and it's fanfic of a fanfic_—_namely, LadyCharity's fantastic _Syrgja _(/s/8514738/1/Syrgja, actual link in profile). Is that sad? I think that's a little sad. It's probably worse that it's 2800 words of woobie!Loki but I don't care, I DON'T CAAAAARE, at least it's something, and _Syrgja_ is awesome and pretty much everything I ever wanted in a Loki fic. This takes place between chapters 23 and 24, when they're about to steal Loki's scepter back from SHIELD headquarters, with flashbacks and references to his captivity with the Chitauri and Thanos. I originally submitted this to LC's Tumblr and got permission to repost it.

Warnings for torture, on roughly the same level as what's in _Syrgja_ itself, so if you're fine with that, this shouldn't be a problem.

* * *

After Loki finagled his way onto the little team planning to retrieve his staff, Thor cornered him away from the others and insisted he get some actual rest before using his magic to infiltrate SHIELD headquarters. Privately he'd wondered about that as well—healing his injury from Natasha's "cognitive recalibration" had drained him more than he wanted to admit, let alone fighting with Thanos and the Mind Gem in the first place—and for once he thought Thor might be right. He still refused, of course, staying up until everyone else disappeared to their own rooms and locking his door behind him (he'd already tampered with JARVIS' surveillance of his room, so that was no concern either), and then he stayed awake for at least an hour anyway, spine prickling with tension no matter which way he lay on the bed, eyes snapping open every time they fell shut. Finally he hauled the bed around so one side was pressed against the wall and curled up facing outward into the room, the wall reassuringly solid at his back.

_You are not a child, to be so daunted by nightmares_, he told himself sternly, which was not very effective, and then _Stark's security was decent last time, do you honestly think he hasn't upgraded it a dozen times since then_, which was a bit more helpful.

He breathed in. Breathed out. Forced himself to relax. Eventually, he slept.

A memory was waiting for him.

* * *

"You like breathing, Asgardian?"

_Don't speak. It's always a trap_.

"You'd best answer," the Chitauri advised. "Else we might decide you don't deserve a choice in the matter at all."

For a moment he wanted that, so badly he could taste it—nothing could be better than a relatively quick death. But they would never give him that. Cautiously, he nodded.

The Chitauri leered at him and wrapped one rough hand around Loki's throat. "Let's try a little experiment then, hm? We're all getting rather tired of listening to you scream." It drew a barbed, jagged knife that glinted in the starlight. Loki tensed, instinct demanding he pull away, fight, anything, but he didn't have the strength, and he could feel his pulse hammering against the Chitauri's fingers. It leaned in toward him, its fetid breath nearly choking him already, and its voice was low and vastly amused. "Don't make a sound."

He tried. Tried with everything left to him as the knife carved shallow designs into his skin, as it slipped deeper to tear at his brutalized insides, as the Chitauri slowly bent back each finger of his right hand as far as it could go and then just enough further until he couldn't distinguish one pain from another, and each breath felt like a ragged sob, but he kept silent.

"Still so quiet?" The Chitauri shifted its weight forward, putting a little pressure on his windpipe, and when he gasped in reflex, it jabbed the tip of the knife through his tongue and pulled. Blood flooded his mouth and he choked, but he couldn't—wouldn't—_don't make a sound don't—_

The knife slid free and clattered to the rocks, and the Chitauri sat back, idly grinding its knee into Loki's already-broken hand. He clenched his jaw until he thought his teeth would be crushed to powder, but he did not cry out, would not make a sound, until the alien uncorked a flask and dripped its contents into one of Loki's open wounds.

He screamed. He couldn't _not_—staying silent was physically no longer an option. The liquid burned like acid, eating away layers of skin and flooding raw nerves with searing agony. He was past all thought, unable even to remember why he shouldn't make a noise, and then the Chitauri's hand _constricted_, crushing his ragged scream into a barely audible gasp. He couldn't think, couldn't move, couldn't _breathe_, drowning in pain and panic. With his unbroken hand he tried to pry away the Chitauri's fingers, and it laughed at his increasingly desperate attempts to loosen its grip.

As blackness started to cloud his vision, as even the pain started to fade and he thought perhaps—oh, please—they would finally kill him after all and _end this_—the Chitauri let go and sat back. Air flooded Loki's lungs and his wheezing gasps sounded impossibly loud in his own ears, and that was bad but he couldn't remember why.

The Chitauri watched him, and toyed with its knife, and smiled, and then it started again.

Time lost any meaning it might once have had and this new game never seemed to end. The Chitauri—maybe the same one, maybe others, he didn't know and it didn't matter—hurt him, again and again, daggers and whips and needles and fire and poison, taunting him for his silence and then choking him nearly unconscious every time they managed to wring a sound from him (and sometimes when they didn't). They would let him take a few full breaths, air scraping like razor wire over the inside of his abused throat, and then they would come back. Once, after they gouged out his eyes and he couldn't hold back a scream, they hanged him from a noose studded with tiny thorns, and he clawed together the last dregs of his energy and fought it, fingers scrabbling over the barbed rope strangling him, legs thrashing pointlessly over thin air—not to free himself, that was impossible, but to use up his remaining oxygen just a little more quickly, hasten the approach of merciful blackness, _please_—

But when he finally slipped under, they electrocuted him awake, denying him that escape too.

After a very long time, they tired of that game for now and left him exhausted and curled on his side in the crater, body shuddering with the effort of staying silent as he tried to gulp air back into his aching lungs. He couldn't see, wouldn't for days until his eyes healed enough, and he couldn't hear the Chitauri around him anymore but that meant nothing, they never left him truly alone, of course they were waiting for him to make another mistake. (As if that was even a question. What was his entire life, if not a string of failures that could never stop until he died? He could not even find the means or the strength to reach for that end himself.)

The next time Thanos came for him, Loki was still too blind to hide, and he didn't beg or cry out as the war titan tore him apart. Pain throttled him so he couldn't breathe anyway, but he didn't think he could scream anymore if he tried. Thanos, he thought distantly, was pleased.

* * *

He woke, disoriented, and lay rigid for a long moment as his heart pounded hard enough to nauseate him and his mind scrambled to make sense of his surroundings. Dark, but not the impenetrable blackness of empty eye sockets, and underneath him not the rock of a barren moon but something impossibly soft—

Stark Tower. Of course. He clenched and unclenched his fists, trying to regain control as his pulse gradually slowed (and he was almost certainly imagining the flicker of _smugness_ from the Mind Gem). He was on Midgard, away from Thanos and the Chitauri, living in the same tower as people who at least tolerated him despite everything, and he was—

Well. Not _safe_. Safety was an illusion. But—better. And after he had his staff back, perhaps better still.

Hope was almost certainly an illusion too. But this was something. And once he had his staff, once they could (try to) cap the Mind Gem's power and free his magic, he would have far less reason to think trying to sleep was a good idea. Not that he'd thought it was a good idea this time, either, but at least next time he wouldn't decide to give in to Thor's badgering.

He kicked off the blankets and got up, but the feeling of being trapped didn't lessen, and his mouth was painfully dry. This familiar room suddenly felt far too small, and he couldn't face the thought of waiting here until everyone else got up. He certainly wasn't going to sleep again.

Loki made himself stay in the room long enough to dress properly and shove the bed back into its original spot (for once he was grateful for Tony's ridiculously large tower and soundproof walls), and then he left without any clear idea of where he was going, only that he couldn't keep still.

Eventually his aimless wandering took him near this floor's kitchen. The light was on, but with Tony's resources, that didn't mean much, so it took him a moment to notice Pepper, clad in sensible pajamas and sitting at the table with a laptop. She was quite focused on whatever she was typing, and he didn't want to startle her—and worse, if Thanos chose a moment like this to seize his mind, Pepper would be far less equipped to defend herself than Natasha had been.

Then she glanced up, spotted him, and smiled like this was the most natural thing in the world, and he didn't particularly want to be alone. (Besides, not all of his modifications to JARVIS had focused on pranking Tony or maintaining his own privacy—and Tony would have warned Pepper, in any case.)

Still, he hesitated another moment until she said, "Come on in, Loki, I'm just answering email," and then he headed for the sink, trying to remember which of the empty cupboards actually held anything useful.

"There's fresh coffee on the counter, if you're not planning to sleep more. Mugs in the third cupboard to your left."

He glanced at her sharply, but she was looking at the laptop screen again, a tiny crease of concentration appearing between her brows as she tapped at the keys, backspaced, typed again. She couldn't know he'd actually been trying to sleep, surely.

"Creamer in the fridge," she added. "A bunch of different flavors because Tony loves having options and then usually drinks his coffee black anyway." She took a sip from her own mug, eyes never leaving the screen. "Also, I promise it's not kopi luwak this time."

Loki grimaced. Why humans would want to pay enormous amounts of money for coffee beans passed through a small animal's digestive tract was utterly beyond him, although given some of Tony's other eccentricities, it hadn't been terribly surprising that he would have some around (or, for that matter, that he would have bought vast quantities of the stuff, decided he didn't like it, and attempted to foist it off on the tower's other inhabitants). He poured himself a mug of coffee, added enough mocha-flavored creamer to disguise the bitterness, and hesitated again before perching on a stool at the bar.

Pepper leaned back in her chair. "Didn't sleep much either, huh?"

He frowned. The fact that he never slept seemed to be common knowledge around the tower, but why would she think he'd tried—and, more importantly, failed?

She seemed to guess his thoughts, and her lips twitched. "You've got a little bedhead going on there."

Loki reached up self-consciously to touch his hair. It hadn't even occurred to him to check. He wondered, not for the first time, how someone with such a keen eye for detail managed to put up with Tony's fairly haphazard style. Belatedly he realized she was still waiting for an answer to her question, so he shrugged, then gestured to the laptop, eyebrow raised.

"What am I doing up at this godforsaken hour too?" He nodded. "I just don't sleep well, every now and then. So I figure I might as well get something done instead of just lying in bed. That, or some of Tony's terrible habits are starting to rub off on me." He must have looked appalled, because she laughed at his expression and shook her head. "Don't worry, I still have a fully functioning sense of self-preservation."

He snorted silently and let his gaze wander around the kitchen. Outside the windows, the sun hadn't risen—wouldn't for at least a few hours, he guessed—but it was far from truly dark; this city never slept either, apparently.

(If it did, would it dream of him? How many nightmares had he caused with his ill-fated invasion?)

"You know," Pepper said, tone carefully neutral, "Tony used to have a lot of nightmares." Loki looked at her in surprise, and she nodded, wrapping both hands around her own mug. "After the battle of New York."

Loki's shoulders hunched. How much did it matter what he did now, when he couldn't take back anything he'd done?

"I'm not trying to make you feel guiltier about it," Pepper said, once again knowing what he was thinking (although it was probably easier this time, to be honest). "He had nightmares after Afghanistan, too—I just wasn't in quite as much of a place to see, and for a long time he didn't want to talk about it. I think it was a little better after New York, but for a while he barely slept—less than he does now, I mean—and he even had a few panic attacks."

Loki almost wanted to laugh at the sheer absurdity of the situation. He was living in the same building as people he'd quite personally tried to kill only three Midgardian years ago, and now he was sharing coffee with the Stark Industries CEO as she almost offhandedly discussed one of Iron Man's weaknesses. How in the Nine Realms had he—had all of them—come to this point?

"Loki," Pepper asked gently, still watching him, "do you have nightmares?"

The urge to laugh vanished, replaced by a tightening in his gut and the memory of coarse hands around his throat, of bleeding and suffocating and wanting to die. He swallowed hard. Natasha thought herself pathetic for the dreams that plagued her; what was to say she wouldn't think the same of Loki, if he admitted this was one of the reasons he never slept? But Pepper had just offered him a truth for no particular reason and he owed her something. After a long moment, he nodded.

"That's normal," she said. "I mean—my degrees were in business, not psychology, but I had a few of those classes too, and I read. It's _really_ normal. Minds take time to heal. We're not always good about knowing how to help them heal, but we've come a long way in understanding how post-traumatic stress works. It happens to more people than you might think."

_There are no men like me_. Well, he'd been wrong about nearly everything else, hadn't he?

"All I'm really saying," Pepper said, "is that none of this has anything to do with not being strong enough. Invisible wounds are still wounds—they just take longer to heal. But if someone as bullheaded and sometimes self-destructive as Tony isn't a lost cause, well…I'd say you've got a shot."

Loki took another sip of coffee and tried to pretend he wasn't avoiding her too-observant gaze. The situations were vastly different—Tony, to begin with, was not a Frost Giant, and he had not tried to destroy one race and conquer another—but true enough, a downward spiral for a mind like Tony's would be a formidable thing, neither lightly inflicted nor lightly brushed aside. She was still wrong, of course; she had not seen him become nothing over and over again at the hands of the Chitauri and their master (none of them had, and thank the Norns for it), and she did not know how the mere thought of Thanos could nauseate him with fear, or she would not casually tell him he was not weak. But she knew part of the story, and she—had compassion for him rather than pitying him, there was a difference, and she didn't see him as pathetic. That was…something.

After a moment, he offered her a small smile, and that was weak thanks, but it was genuine and the best he could do. She smiled back, rather more warmly than he'd done anything to deserve (now or ever), and stood up. "Speaking of Tony, I think everyone was actually planning to get up soon anyway, and if I don't go bully him a little, he probably won't have a real breakfast. I'll be back in a bit."

Loki watched her go, hands curled around his mug, needing the warmth a little less than he had a few minutes ago but more than he should. He didn't want to be here, alone, with nothing but his own poisoned memories to keep him company.

(He could still feel the hands, the claws, Thanos' fingers twisted in his hair—)

Abruptly he rose and opened the pantry, staring in blindly for inspiration. He wasn't particularly hungry but Pepper _had _mentioned breakfast and everyone else needed to eat, and if trying to make the Avengers food was pitifully inadequate thanks for everything they'd done, at least it would give him something to _do_.


End file.
